DISQUS

I have to agree with Ben in regards to hardware acceleration. For Jeff, Troy, and Ben, you may be able to guess why. Sharendipity was originally implemented as a Java applet, with hardware acceleration via OpenGL. All other Java issues aside, when you're looking at casual games then you want a unified user experience. We couldn't provide that in Java with OpenGL, no matter what. And we spent all of our time trying to figure out why Sharendipity wouldn't run on machines like my dad's laptop.

Jeff, you touched on this as a bit too: if %30-50 of the install base either can't run or has an app running at a different speed than the other %50-70, you have a lot of problems. Imagine if even 30% of the people on Kongregate couldn't run most of the games there (and why doesn't Kongregate support Java applets then, or Unity, or...). If there's a way to provide the same user experience to everyone, that's great, but I don't know how it's possible when you're throwing hardware configurations into the mix. Differing CPU speeds by themselves provide enough issues for game developers (as Troy said, to be developing for XNA is in many ways a lot easier than developing for the web/PC). And if Adobe goes down the path of having different versions of Flash (accelerated or not) or supporting different hardware configurations, we run into the Java problem all over again. This is the worst case scenario.

I think that one of the main reasons Flash has achieved the ubiquity it has is because of the unified user experience. If you're targeting %50-70 of Flash's install base, then why not go with something like Unity which will be more accepted by the demographic you're developing for and provides the functionality you need?

As for the tools, well Ben and I have said our piece directly to Adobe. Flex Builder (Flash Builder...) needs to be 100 times better. I've reiterated it to every Adobe evangelist I can find. We just need more people on the bandwagon.

Ben, great post.

well it's certainly easier not to build the UI in the first place... I'm really more interested in the proof of concept rather than the actual use I guess :) Especially since we don't have designers...

When you were using the custom UI was it in fact hooked up to the Google Spreadsheet, or was it just editing local data?

so next step... a UI layer that lets you tweak the parameters for Grunts, editing the data in your spreadsheet at the same time. Doesn't seem like their API allows it unfortunately, although I haven't dug that much.

@Anon fan your question is a fantastic one. Personally, I believe it's because we don't work to police it ourselves, but see my next response below.

@Malena my head just exploded. In a good way. This conversation can go so many different ways. Here's my first attempt: I talk about people policing the industry themselves but it's like Lord of the Flies where in the end the Officer says he expects better of the British children while believing them only to be playing a game. Yet he doesn't know what's really going on and in reality children were murdered. So maybe letting kids be kids just isn't possible.

I think that one large problem is that much of society doesn't understand what is really happening in the gaming culture. It is ignored, assuming the best. But in reality there are some really awful, persistent issues with the culture. The culture surrounding Music and Movies have been brought into the mainstream, so why shouldn't that of the gaming industry?

I don't really think that these behaviors are inherited from our parents (some certainly are), but behaviors that were allowed to persist because nobody knew about it. I guess what I'm saying is that someone needs to hold us accountable because we don't seem to be very good at doing it ourselves.

One of the things that commonly gets overlooked is that Twitter can be a great tool for companies that have a much more local focus as well. Using search.twitter.com and near:Madison,WI I can find out what people are saying in my area. Combine that with more targeted keywords and you have a pretty good direct marketing tool. I wrote about some of this here as well: http://www.dalebeermann.com/2008/08/social-medi...

I was actually thinking about this on the way to work today, with respect to Facebook applications. We see lots of in-Facebook ad networks popping up (Zynga and SGN are two obvious ones), but a lot of their advertising is for other applications or services unrelated to the application (buy car insurance - get 10,000 poker chips).

It's the social network that's supposed to provide demographic data for targeted advertising. The applications in these network provide little benefit with regards to advertising inventory that can be targeted by large brands (who advertises on the Zombies application?) and few of them have business models that are generating revenue outside of advertising.

Won't there be a saturation point where other applications will stop paying for installs? Are advertiser's CPMs/CPCs/CPAs any better in these networks than they would be through AdWords? How will ad networks sustain themselves in a market saturated with inventory that (generally) adds little benefit on top of the social network within which those adds are being served?